by Carolyne Lee, an Australian Francophile

(A review by guest writer David Siddall)

Stephen Clarke’s A Year in the Merde tracks the adventures of twenty-something English (anti) hero Paul West as he spends a chaotic year in the French capital.

Monsieur West has successfully marketed French cafés to the English but now finds himself recruited with the sterner task of marketing English tea rooms to the French. Armed with the least productive team in Paris and a boss possessing the cataclysmic combination of a relentless political will and a distinct lack of morals, it becomes clear that the project’s chances of success are limited. Paul finds a further challenge in coming to grips with the Parisienne way of life as he learns how he must stop wanting to be liked and start being rude to get his way, a tactic epitomized in his embrace of the French ‘shrug’.

Whilst the title of this book is somewhat uncouth and the story comes complete with the typical clichés of snails, suppositories, steak hachés and strikes, Clarke somehow manages to breathe new life into them in a most hilarious manner thanks to the lucidity and simplicity of his prose. Through the ambitious and somewhat arrogant character of Paul West we quickly learn how to manipulate the French system in our favour, bed an array of Parisienne beauties (editor: and Parisiens also, by analogy?), and get our piece of the good life with a French house in the countryside.

Clarke presents an addictive insight into French life that is hard to put down. Being an Englishmen who has had the pleasure of a recent trip to France as well as living with a French couple for the past year in Melbourne, I can see just how accurate Clarke’s musings really are. And even if the soothsaying is thin on the ground in parts, you can forgive Clarke’s poetic license in heightening the comedic effect.

A Year in the Merde has been read by everyone in our house in the space of about three weeks and loved in equal measures by French and English alike. My ‘three Days in the Merde’ was an exhilarating experience which should be shared by those who love anything French or those just just love a well spun yarn.

For a few weeks now I’ve been listening to various French radio stations via my computer,  thank to a great application called Radio Sure. This free internet radio application permits access to hundreds of radio stations all over the world–all in real time. With the Radio Sure program open on my desktop, as shown, I group all the stations by language, to make it easier to brows the French language stations; then I scroll through the French list to find my favourites. My current one is called Nostalgie La Legende–chansons francaises, a bit like ‘golden oldies’. It seems to play all the French songs from my childhood, through to those from the eighties. I can have the radio on in the background while working on other programs, or even while doing something else in the room. I have just the standard application, but you can buy fancy ’skins’ quite cheaply from the Radio Sure website, including some that look like actual radios.

I’ve blogged before about Radio France International, and in particular their Apprendre (Learn French) section. I attribute my (albeit very quotidian) fluency almost entirely to this service—or at least to the way in which I make use of it.

It all began a few years ago when I was in the middle of my first longish stint living in Paris, and was bemoaning to an American friend that my French was not improving as much as I had hoped.  My friend told me that when she had first arrived a few years earlier, she had heard of a method (I forget its name) which works by training the ear to better understand French by playing a recording of someone speaking over and over again for several hours per week. So she had dutifully gone to this company, parted with quite a lot of money, put the headphones on, and sat there for a few hours a week. When I asked her what the recording was, she said it was mainly Le Petit Prince.

 Now I love Le Petit Prince, and have ever since I read it in my year 12 French class a million years ago, but I couldn’t see how listening to the same thing over and over would be:  a) very interesting, and b) would not be more efficacious if one listened to a variety of things, changing them every few days perhaps.

 I promptly went to FNAC and bought myself a tiny radio and headphones, and began listening to several of the Paris radio stations. I remember one of them—France Info—simply being news bulletins over and over, which was very good as I began to learn many new words over the course of a few periods of listening. The station France Culture was also interesting, with extended discussions on various topics.

I found that even if I did not understand much of the radio program (which happened for the first few weeks, and even later if I was tired or distracted), by the time I arrived at work and had to use a very mundane level of French for greetings and fairly routine things, I could understand everyone much better. Clearly this was something to do with my ear being ‘trained’ to be more receptive to French.

Back in Australia of course, I could not get access to the French radio stations. This drove me to the Radio France International website, to see what they had in podcast versions, and then I found their Apprendre section which is a treasure-house of learning experiences.  I love the daily Français Facile. This is a 10 minute news podcast, with a transcript so that one can even follow the text while listening. There used to be two Français Faciles each day until M. Sarkozy cut back the funding (the radio staff were on strike for weeks, and the Apprendre section was the hardest hit—a very dark period for me indeed!). But then they came back with one per day, and which I regard as pure gold.

There are several other types of podcast I use regularly from the Apprendre section of RFI, all in MP3 format.

Les mots de l’actualité : This is a short daily segment on a word taken out of the news bulletins and explained, its origins traced, and so on. The presenter, Yvan Amar calls this : une chronique pétillante qui éclaire en deux minutes un mot ou une expression entendue dans l’actualité  (‘a sparkling column which in two minutes throws light on a word or expression from current events’).

Today’s word is le deluge. These podcasts usually lasts 1-3 minutes, and also have a transcript listeners may read.

 My absolute favourite is La Danse des Mots, also presented by Yvan Amar. There are about  3-4 per week of these programs (some are repeats from the last year or so), each lasting about 20 minutes.

 Yvan Amar describes his program thus : Le français sur Internet, l’évolution de l’orthographe, le Camfranglais qu’on parle au Cameroun, et même ailleurs, l’explosion de la littérature francophone tout autour du monde. Des sujets qui montrent bien l’intérêt extrêmement sensible que l’on porte aujourd’hui à nos façons de parler.  S’interroger sur la langue n’est pas seulement une curiosité aiguë : c’est un révélateur du monde où nous vivons. (French on the internet, the evolution of spelling, Camfranglais, which they speak in the Camerouns, and even elsewhere, the explosion of French literaure all around the world : these subjects are well placed to show us the very noticeable interest that there is today in our ways of speaking. To interrogate the subject of language is not only a matter of keen curiosity : it’s revealing of the world in which we live.)

Rather than trying to describe the particular subject matter of this program, I suggest readers check it out themselves by looking at the range of recent programmes in the Danse des Mots archives. Depending on the type of cell phone you use, I think it’s possible to download the podcasts directly, but as my cell phone is rather last-century, I download the MP3s onto my computer and then transfer them with a cord connected to my iPod equivalent.

When I’m out, I always have my iPod with me, and listen while walking to and from work and while walking around during the day (so I clock up about half an hour of listening there), while riding on public transport, and also when I have to wait in doctors’ surgeries, or wait for any other purpose. All this exposure to French, just fitted into the spare moments in my day!

I’m certain all this listening I do is the reason I’m able to avoid my level of French going ‘backwards’ in the 6-9 month periods when I have to be back in Australia. 

My hometown newspaper the Melbourne Age features a long article today on how the Atlantic salmon are returning to the Seine, and how this is a sign of the improved water purity. Love the picture of the fisherman at Suresne with his 7kg salmon!

 Like many Australian women, I LOVE French bed linen, and have bought several sets over the past few years. Last month I bought a beautiful set by Anne de Solène in the soldes at BHV (I’ve just discovered her website and you can see the one I bought on the left).

The only problem with buying bed linen in France to bring back to Australia is that the standard sizes are different, so you need to have the dimensions of your bed, and your doona, written down.

I discovered this after I brought my first set of French bed linen back to Australia a few years ago. The fitted sheet was perfect, but the housse de couette (doona cover) was 30cm too wide. But instead of taking it in and cutting off the excess, I decided to run a line of stitching down each side, on the outside (as opposed to the inside) of the cover, 15cm in from the edge. After the doona was inserted, it was held in place, and the extra material hanging down beyond the line of stitching created a ‘valence’-effect on each side of the bed, complementing the wide ‘sleevy’ thing at the bottom of French doona covers, which also creates a valence, at the end of the bed.  I’ve always preferred this to the Australian type with buttons or fasteners, and which barely cover the end of the mattress.

With the doona cover I just bought, I had the problem again, and worse, because I could only obtain the larger size, judging from the dimensions on the packaging; but I loved the design so much I HAD to take it, especially at BHV soldes price.

Back in Australia, after carefully measuring both my mattress, the height of my bed and my doona, I found the new cover was 20cm too long, and 60cm too wide. So I sewed a straight line of stitching along the top, 20cm in from the edge, and another two lines, similar to what I’d done with the previous doona cover, one down each side, 30cm in from each side edge.

At the top I then had a piece of fabric to fold over near the pillows, which works well, and a valence on each side, which doesn’t quite reach the floor.

Obviously you need to know the height of your bed if you are going to do this, and if you are innumerate like me, you might want to check all the measurements twice, and draw diagrams to guide your sewing, as I did.

 But the effect is stunning, and of course completely unique (duhh… until everyone reads this, I guess)…

My blog is now featured on the cover of my new book–Word Bytes: Writing in the Information Society! (can be bought at http://tinyurl.com/m9mnev )